Sarah Palin hopes that Martin Bashir’s vulgar outburst against her does not deter anyone with something to contribute from hopping into the political arena. The former Alaska governor reacted to the news of Bashir’s resignation on Fox & Friends Thursday morning and thanked those in the media who supported her.
“It was refreshing to see that many in the media did come out and say ‘we have to have higher standards than this,'” Palin told Steve Doocy, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and Brian Kilmeade, adding that she thought her role in the issue had ended. “My role was to accept his apology, be humble, and move on,” she explained, responding to whether she thought a resignation was enough or if Bashir should have been fired. MSNBC has not yet apologized for the incident, despite Bashir’s monologue being entirely scripted.
Quoting from her new book, Good Tidings and Great Joy, Hasselbeck asked Palin whether she thought the lessons from the book were applicable to the Bashir affair, particularly the line, “If you live and love this world, you will be hurt.” Palin agreed and focused her emphasis on telling the audience that no amount of leftist vitriol would make fighting for her values not worth it. “I hope [these comments] don’t result in people being hesitant to jump in the arena,” she said, adding later that the issue would not be for Bashir or anyone like him to attack her–“at this point, I’m used to it”–but someone “who can’t defend themselves.” At that point, “I’ll go ballistic on that person,” she promised.
That Palin can handle the hate that comes her way is not exactly a positive thing, according to the governor. “It’s a sad state of affairs to admit that I am used to it,” she told the Fox & Friends crew, because it means such comments are not a particular outrage deviating from the norm, but “par for the course.” The bias against conservatives–particularly conservative women in politics–she noted was “obvious,” and it made her “calloused, but not in a bad way.”
Her time on Fox & Friends yielded more than just her reaction to the Bashir incident finally ending with his goodbye, however. Governor Palin responded to questions about the current Obamacare mess, decrying the insistence on the government’s part of “picking winners and losers and in the mean time Joe Blow American is suffering.” She hoped for some resolution on that front. She also spoke of the miracle of Christmas and her book, and how she loved it so because it was not “my” message, but that of the story of Christmas.
Fox News has put the entire segment online–watch Palin’s reaction to Bashir and her conversation on other topics here.
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